Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
Photogram: Wine Glass, 1938.
Collection of Hattula Moholy-Nagy.
Abstraction in Photography

During the first half of the twentieth century, a number of abstract artists who were working simultaneously in several different mediums praised photography as the most progressive means of expression.

Requiring the mediation of a mechanical device the camera and chemical solutions, photography represented the ultimate Modernist art form, for science and technology were essential to the artwork s creation. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian artist wh o first came to prominence as a teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany, is among those credited with producing the first non-objective photographs.

Pursuing what he called the new vision an art appropriate to the modern age Moholy-Nagy produced abstract works in various mediums, including painting, sculpture, film, design, and photography. His sustained interest in light, space, and motion l ed him to make photograms, photographs created without a camera by arranging objects directly on light-sensitive paper, which is then exposed to light in bursts or for sustained periods. By shifting the arrangement and repeating the process with the same piece of paper, Moholy-Nagy produced ethereal traces of an object s form and its movement across the paper, while disguising its original identity.

He created the impression of three-dimensional form by varying the density of lights and darks across the image surface, a technique he could also use to make an object appear either transparent or opaque.

Abstraction in the Twentieth Century

Total Risk, Freedom, Discpline

The Pioneers

Between the Wars

Abstract Expressionism

Monochrome Painting

Minimal Sculpture

Post-Minimal Sculpture

Abstraction in:

Music

Theater

Architecture

Poetry

Film

Dance